The Assignee has developed mobile phones, personal data assistants (PDAs) and other mobile telecommunication devices, with the ability to print hard copies of images or information stored or accessed by the device (see for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,405,055, filed on Nov. 9, 1999). Likewise, the Assignee has also designed digital cameras with the ability to print captured images with an inbuilt printer (see for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,750,901 filed Jul. 10, 1998. As the prevalence of mobile telecommunications devices with digital cameras increases, the functionality of these devices is further enhanced by the ability to print hard copies.
As these devices are portable, they must be compact for user convenience. Accordingly, any printer incorporated into the device needs to maintain a small form factor. Also, the additional load on the battery should be as little as possible. Furthermore, the consumables (ink and paper etc) should be relatively inexpensive and simple to replenish. It is these factors that strongly influence the commercial success or otherwise of products of this type. With these basic design imperatives in mind, there are on-going efforts to improve and refine the functionality of these devices.
The Assignee of the present invention has also developed the Netpage system for enabling interaction with computer software using a printed interface and a proprietary stylus-shaped sensing device.
As described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,165, filed on Nov. 25, 2000 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/778,056, filed on Feb. 17, 2004, a Netpage pen captures, identifies and decodes tags of coded data printed onto a surface such as a page. In a preferred Netpage implementation, each tag encodes a position and an identity of the document. By decoding at least one of the tags and transmitting the position (or a refined version of the position, representing a higher resolution position of the pen) and identity referred to by the decoded tag, a remote computer can determine an action to perform. Such actions can include, for example, causing information to be saved remotely for subsequent retrieval, downloading of a webpage for printing or display via a computer, bill payment or even the performance of handwriting recognition based on a series of locations of the Netpage pen relative to the surface. These and other applications are described in many of the Netpage-related applications cross-referenced by the present application.
When printing a Netpage, a printer in a mobile telecommunications device can print the Netpage tags simultaneously with visible user information. The association between the tags and information can already exist on a remote Netpage server, such as where the printer is printing a fully rendered page (including tags) provided by the Netpage server or another computer. Alternatively, the mobile telecommunications device can generate the tags (or source them remotely) and define an association between the tags and user information. The association is then recorded in the remote Netpage server.
The problem with these options is that they require the mobile telecommunications device to include Netpage tag printing capabilities. This requires an additional row of print nozzles in the printhead, and reduces the amounts of ink that can be stored for non-tag use. Whilst this is less of an issue with large, mains-powered printers, it can be an issue in small form-factor articles such as mobile telecommunications devices.
Alternatively, the mobile telecommunications device can be configured to print on print media that is pre-printed with Netpage tags. That way the printer need only print the user information and record an association between the visible information and the pre-printed tags.
One way of doing this is to use a Netpage sensing device that scans the page as it is printed to determine the content of at least one of the tags and positions of various elements of the user information relative to the tags. This requires that the printer include a Netpage sensing device, which may be somewhat bulky for use in mobile applications, and requires additional processing capacity. Even if a Netpage sensing device is provided to enable the mobile telecommunications device to act as a Netpage pen in a more general sense, it is undesirable for a user to have to separately scan a portion of the pre-printed media to determine parameters of the coded data before inserting the media for printing.
It would be desirable to overcome the problem of associating user information to be printed onto media at least partially pre-printed with Netpage tags.